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Why Scrum is stressing you out

rethinkingsoftware.substack.com

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Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#111

Post by ozim »

bruce511 wrote: post #95
Aeolun wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Agreed. (Assuming you mean "create" as in write, as distinct from create as in get funded.) You are essentially saying “Shit is bad, give up on it ever improving.”

Not at all. Quite the opposite. To improve the situation you first need to understand it. It seems to me that most devs don't understand the root problem, so they both don't understand, and don't constructively improve the current solution. Improvement is not "leave me alone". Improvement is finding efficient ways to remove stress from higher-ups. Because stress rolls downhill.

I would not say most devs.

I think ones that are against scrum are loud about it on the internet.

When it comes to have their salary paid out they will not speak up for themselves to push back against shitty management.

Like accepting ever increasing velocity until they burn out or accepting bad requirements because business is sayin “it needs to be done now” and working blind only to be scolded they did bad but requirements were bad in the first place.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#112

Post by kkfx »

People like to forget a thing: Kanban, which is the scrum "ancestor", was designed for FACTORY MASS PRODUCTION of already designed parts, not for designing new ones, on other words it's a system that works only if what you do is pre-defined, does not demand much intellectual, creative activities and anything it's well known in advance.

Applying it to creative activities is a classic application of a religion to a society blindly believing it's universal. It's not. That's the substantial stress.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#114

Post by jghn »

repox wrote: post #110
Aeolun wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long.

> They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long. I'm Head of Development in a midsized SaaS company. Another team's PM went for paternity leave and I stepped in to lean in on any needs. I discovered that the team of 10 people were using close to an hour a day on stand-up. A culture thing, apparently. I joined he stand-up a few times, slimmed the scope of the conversation to roughly 10-15 minutes. This worked for…

It Depends.

I said in another post that I hated all the ceremonies, including standup. And it goes without saying that means long standups.

But, one team I was one, we had long ass standup and it was perfect. It was very dev-driven, we were facing hard problems, and that was our time of the day to really nerd out. The PM would get bored after about 15-20 minutes and then we'd be working out how to deal with the issues that faced us. Sure, it could have happened at any point of the day, but that was our designated time where we were all in the office (this was pre-pandemic)

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#115

Post by ern »

luckydata wrote: post #30

nobody has ever done "waterfall", it's a strawman created to explain why traditional project management doesn't work in software development. The fact that the article starts with "in the good old days of waterfall" takes away every expectation that I'll read anything intelligent in the article, I believe this post doesn't deserve your time and definitely doesn't deserve mine.

I’m not sure why the above comment is being downvoted:

I was reading The Practice of Cloud System Administration: Designing and Operating Large Distributed Systems, and I came across this quote:

Royce’s 1970 paper, which is credited with “inventing” the model, actually identifies it so Royce can criticize it and suggest improvements. He wrote it is “risky and invites failure” because “design iterations are never confined to the successive step.” What Royce suggests as an alternative is similar to what we now call Agile. Sadly, multiple generations of software developers have had to suffer through waterfall projects thanks to people who, we can only assume, didn’t read the entire paper (Pfeiffer 2012) [p. 175].

https://www.jjinux.com/2015/07/the-waterfall-model-was-straw...

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#117

Post by intelVISA »

bruce511 wrote: post #80
cdaringe wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ex manager here. managers are in an even worse wheel. biz demands managers show up to even _dumber_, less organized meetings than devs think they have to deal with. eng to eng meetings tend to be fine, but the rest of company culture at BigCorp weren’t trained in structured problem solving. it’s negotiating with goldfish half of the time (generally friendly goldfish), and no one actually practices any formalisms or l…

With software you have a situation with two problems. First is the "gap" between those doing the work, and those writing the checks. (When it's the same person, this problem disappears.) The guy editing the checks likes to understand progress is being made, and that the project both has an end and will be successfully completed. The second problem is that by it's nature software "never ends" and many (dare I say most…

It's beyond software: any domain that requires oversight of non-trivial work should really have leadership from the ranks so they are able to ground their observations.

Managers with no domain knowledge are just an extra layer of indirection and overhead without any of the benefits. Would any IC want their career gated by someone who has zero insight into the team's day to day duties, doubly so if it's at a supposed "tech" company?

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#119

Post by justmarc »

AnarchismIsCool wrote: post #3

I've learned to hate software process. If you have team sizes set sanely and empower devs to do what they need to do in order to accomplish the goal, they'll be fine without the management overhead of arbitrarily imposed productivity flow. Agile et al, along with 99% of the features in ticketing systems, exist to make managers feel like they are justifying their paycheck. If you are a manager and this makes you angry…

Absolutely right. Well put.

Re: Why Scrum is stressing you out

#120

Post by lpapez »

Aeolun wrote: post #81
wild_egg wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Daily stand-ups, the main benefit of which is that managers (EMs/PMs) get daily updates on status. The scrum guide fairly explicitly states that managers should not attend or be part of stand-ups unless they're actively involved in the work as part of the development team.

It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers. They also tend to make the stand-ups one hour long.

> It may be explicitly stated, but I’ve never had a scrum meeting without all managers and project managers.

This, this, this and a thousand times this.

It's always the same with Scrum. Every time you point out something clearly wrong, the response is always "well that's not really scrum, you're doing it wrong".

It's like when discussing communism with some diehard fans - when you point out the flaws, the response is always "well that wasn't real communism that's why it failed".

Well to both of those camps I say: if most attempts ended up implementing it "incorrectly" in the end, it's not a very useful framework to begin with then, is it?

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